Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Loving Jack Layton, hating Stephen Harper

Nice country we had, onceIf the NDP had surged just a little more than it did during the last federal election campaign, the Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébertobserves, it could easily have formed a government, either as a minority or in coalition with the Liberals And then, sadly, Jack Layton would have died. And then Nycole Turmel would have become Prime Minister, or some other crazy outcome that would have been most undesirable in uncertain times such as these. That’s the way the democratic cookie crumbles, of course, but “in hindsight,” anyway, Hébert believes that journalists took an unacceptably “gloves-on approach to the issue of Layton’s health.” She says “no one was really under the impression that Layton’s fractured hip was the result of an innocuous slip,” and she suggests “Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff would have been questioned more aggressively.”

It’s a tough issue. A prominent politician’s health is of more public interest than a private citizen’s, but is there any reason to think “taking the gloves off” (whatever that means, practically) would have yielded information useful to the voter? We’ll say this, though: Layton’s health notwithstanding, watching from afar, there seemed to be an inordinate level of chumminess between the NDP leader and the press covering him. We’re not saying he wasn’t asked tough questions, or that the coverage was less than rigorous. But it seemed to invite troubling conclusions from media consumers. At the fantasy newspaper we run, for instance, there is an iron-clad “no singalongs” rule.

Gerald Caplan, writing for TheGlobe and Mail, sets out to alarm us over Stephen Harper having “already dramatically transformed the old Canada,” with goodness knows what horrors yet to come, and succeeds only in convincing us that the Conservatives govern in a manner that’s somewhat more offensive than their Liberal forbears. The problem, if it needs to be said, is that the government is not Canada, writ large, and its ministers are not Canadians, writ large. It’s the same country, folks. And for politicians who really do think Harper is ruining the joint — well, nearly a decade of Caplan-esque doom-mongering hasn’t convinced Canadians. Maybe it’s time for Plan B.

“There really is no evidence the Conservatives actually target women” in their various campaigns of intimidation and slander, says the the Star‘s Tim Harper. But the fact that the Star‘s Tim Harper has noticed what seems to be an inordinate number of women being screwed over by the Conservative government leads the Star‘s Tim Harper to suggest “enough signs” exist to “raise the question.” Er … that’d be the question he just raised, and then dismissed, and then raised again. It’s odd, really. As a profile of three people who “fought back” against the government, the column works just fine. There’s just this big, honking, admittedly dubious premise at its centre.

Paul Wells, writing on his Maclean’s blog, calls the Canadian Taxpayer Federation’s complaints about Peter MacKay’s hotel bills at the (in Wells’ view) extremely important Munich Conference “profoundly idiotic.” And the worst part? “I figure the CTF’s chances of scaring the Harper government away from attending the 2012 Munich conference are a lot better than 50-50,” Wells writes. “Maybe if MacKay got his name legally changed to ‘Gazebo in Tony Clement’s Riding’ he could spend the money he needs to do his job.” Bazinga!

Janice Kennedy, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, is mortified to find herself on the same side of an issue as the “ultra-conservative” Jason Kenney, but nevertheless, in her view, “the face veil is a powerful symbol of subjugation or, at best, second-class status,” and “an aggressive, overt denial of full personhood.” And, she says, “it really doesn’t matter how its wearers feel about it.” Jinkies. Of course it matters: If a woman chooses of her own free will to wear a burka, then her burka isn’t any of the aforementioned things. It is, inescapably, a statement that she prefers (or at least better be willing willing) not to interact with the larger society on an equal footing — and that, we think, is itself a plausible argument to ban it at citizenship ceremonies. But it doesn’t have to be “a tangible public statement that women are less than men,” as Kennedy puts it, unless everyone insists on seeing it as such.

Tabatha Southey, writing in the Globe, mounts a persuasive argument that that many fashion choices made by liberated women have been criticized at one point or another as somehow demeaning or objectifying, and that women must be free to wear what they want. We agree, and we’re not at all clear how someone like Kenney can be so passionate about banning the burka at citizenship ceremonies and yet be adamantly against it in in day-to-day society. But we are equally that people like Southey can straight-facedly argue that a burka is like a shoe, or a face is like an ankle. The Citizen‘s Dan Gardner laid out the psychology behind human facial recognition last week, but honestly, it shouldn’t even be necessary.

World affairsIn a fascinating piece in the Globe, Doug Saunders profiles Antwerp’s “2060” neighbourhood — a landing pad for immigrants, particularly Moroccans, that has both its troubles and, in Saunders’ view, tremendous upside. “Europe’s immigrant neighbourhoods can provide an excellent bottom rung on the ladder,” he observes, “but the second and third rungs are broken or missing, so those who succeed go elsewhere, and those who fail stay behind.” There are well-established ways to fix this, in his view, not least education, commerce and — shudder — “more yuppies.”

George Jonas, writing in the National Post, congratulates the Coalition of the Willing on winning the Iraq War in 2003, and … not so much on the eight years that followed. “The drawn-out, vicious, useless conflict that ended this week was,” he says, “a civil and religious war America and some of its allies got suckered into,” and nothing more. Now, we could theoretically get behind Jonas’s well-known “kill the bastard and get the hell out” school of dictator management. But since nobody who actually runs wars seems to share it, the question becomes much more fundamental: Do we kill the bastard at all?

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.